Research

Research at ASCII aims to make national and international value networks more transparent and resilient to external shocks, such as political and climatic uncertainties. To this end, ASCII develops data-driven analytical tools ranging from mathematics to economics.

TOPICS

ASCII’s work is organized around four interrelated research topics:

Bringing Transparency to Value Chains 

 

Greening Supply Chains for a Sustainable Future 

Improving the Resilience of Supply Networks 

Rethinking the System 

Bringing Transparency to Value Chains  

End-consumers, businesses and policymakers are faced with issues such as sustainability, competitiveness and resilience of economies. However, the individual market actors have limited scope to influence the system as a whole. What they can contribute depends on other actors and how they are interconnected. Therefore, these issues should be considered from a network perspective. Understanding the structure of value chains is key to managing and transforming value networks. 

Yet, knowledge about networks is often fragmented and limited. This makes it difficult to make informed decisions. It also hampers efforts to shift strategic dependencies and production technologies. ASCII research makes global value chains transparent and shows how EU supply chains fit into the global picture. 

ASCII uses data science, AI, and machine learning to understand global value networks. We sift through petabytes of information on the internet to find out how companies collaborate. We systematically combine this new information with other sources of knowledge about production and logistics networks to analyze supply networks. We use this data to monitor strategic interdependencies and contribute to more sustainable, resilient, and competitive value networks.   

The European Commission has set a goal of reducing greenhouse gases by 55% by 2030 and becoming carbon neutral by 2050. At the same time, the Green Deal decouples economic growth from resource use.  

Ambitious climate targets require a restructuring of existing value and supply networks, posing challenges to current economic structures to realize a circular economy. This means moving beyond the traditional buyer-supplier relationship to a more holistic approach. Supply chains are transformed into circular supply networks.  

This greening process will also require new technology. However, there is no single solution that will enable the green transition. Rather a mix of technologies, with each having different implications for supply networks.  

ASCII’s understanding of value, logistics and production networks helps identify upcoming technologies and opportunities for recycling and reuse.  Furthermore, we are working with industry and policy stakeholders to make the circular economy a reality.  

Greening Supply Chains for a Sustainable Future

Improving the Resilience of Supply Networks

Supply chains face many risks, including the collapse of important industries, geopolitical conflicts, or natural resource crises. The disruptions in recent years have shown that we must prepare for continued turbulence. This means raising awareness of the uncertainty in supply networks and developing ways to diversify. Current models of shock propagation and supply chain disruptions may not fully account for resilience and robustness. New approaches are needed to quantify the shock-absorbing capacity of supply networks as complex adaptive systems. 

A supply chain’s resilience relies on its strategic dependencies. Strategic dependencies are the relationships between countries in the production of strategic goods. These include raw materials, pharmaceutical ingredients, batteries, semiconductors, and cloud services. Supply chains are often untransparent, so it’s hard to know how to manage these dependencies.  

ASCII aims to make the strategic dependencies visible through bottom-up supply chain mapping to identify leverage points where policy intervention can have the greatest impact. Thereby we tackle challenges to better understand, manage, and improve the resilience of European and Austrian supply networks.  

Supply chains and value networks are embedded in the economy, society, and the environment. Thus, most of the related challenges go beyond the boundaries of production processes. Supply relationships involve the flow of resources, materials and the transfer of skills and are affected by demographic changes. To address these issues, research on supply networks must also go beyond the boundaries of production processes and develop more complex, evidence-based approaches. Potential supply network transformation pathways must proactively consider and incorporate human resource factors, including worker training, upskilling, reskilling, and mobility. These factors are connected and should not be studied separately. Furthermore, current analyses are often based on sectoral classification, but many challenges depend on a company’s role and position in supply chains. 

ASCII research addresses the influence of societal and technological shifts on global supply chains – with the aim to rethink the system boundaries. We investigate value networks to understand how supply relationships affect sustainable economic growth and quantify company roles in national and global supply networks. 

Rethinking the System